Always ethereal, always eclectic, I write as the mood strikes, when there intrigue reveals itself. Usually that means something controversial or adventure of some sort.

I've tried really hard to be unprovocative, but have as yet been unsuccessful.

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

The Music of Paradise, Five Times a Day

While looking for the khutbah sermon time for my visit to the Idriss Mosque, I came across this little nugget on their site: a free athan program for download! Yup, you can now, for free, here the call to prayer five times a day, as long as your computer is running! It lets you set the city you're in, if you have daylight savings time, which country and city you want to hear the call from, and if you want to hear a short Qur'anic verse afterward. Your computer will even declare the bismillah, "in the name of God most merciful most compassionate", everytime it turns on. It's a wonderful reminder to do all things in God's name, and to pray. And for those of us in dar al harb, the House of War, where we no longer have the pleasure of regularly hearing the Call to Prayer- it is now available! And I must say, in using the one from Mecca, it is an extremely pleasant athan, not at all tinny or artificial, which seemed to be so often the case from the mosques in Morocco.

(Now I'm wanting to play with it to find the prayer times in Antarctica. It's also made me wonder about the direction of prayer towards Mecca, from the exact opposite side of the Earth. If the traditional method is to just use the shortest distance to Mecca on a round globe, if you're in a mosque in French Polynesia, will any direction do?)